What they said about…

The Past Present, 200/2001: ‘…a good mix of thought-provoking work leavened by the occasional humorous piece. All in all, this is a very strong first collection.’ – Zoe King, Editor, Buzzwords Magazine, UK.

Back Burning – Best Fiction Award at IP Australia, 2007: ‘Sylvia Petter is a cartographer of dislocated lives. With compassionate precision, she charts the detours, the disruptive incursions of passion, loneliness and loss, the ever-shifting conceptions of home and of the self. Her characters are always on the move through complicated terrain, and the journey is richly rewarding for the reader.’ – Janette Turner Hospital, prizewinning author of the short story collection, Forecast: Turbulence

Mercury Blobs, Raging Aardvark, Australia, 2013: ‘The brilliant stories in Sylvia Petter’s Mercury Blobs are sometimes very funny and sometimes very moving, and often they are both at once, which is one of the best tests of a truly serious writer. Moreover, she is a master of the very short fictional forms that have become a crucial expressive medium of the 21st-century sensibility. This is a splendid collection from a gifted writer.’ – Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

Consuming the Muse – erotic talesby AstridL, Raging Aardvark, Australia, 2013 : ‘Food, drink, Dionysian indulgences, passion, obsession dominate AstridL’s collection of erotic stories. Some are amuse-bouches, …and others a groaning-board of orgiastic excess. …Appetites of all sorts are bound together as the most essential of human need, and it’s done with intelligence and wit, with twists that lend piquancy in unexpected places and ways. What struck me as I read through the book was the growing maturity of voice in the stories, playful, naughty, stunning, turning thoughtful, detailed, beautifully crafted. It’s an interesting read, complex and varied….’ – Helena Settimana.

‘I felt I was on this journey with you and could visualise so much. …Family secrets can make us unsure about where we have come from.’ – a reader in NSW, Australia

‘This book employs a bold and unusual device to explore truth and memory in the lives of a family fractured by war and exile. And it has a subtlety to it, which I found compelling.’ – Jason Goodwin, bestselling author of The Baklava Club